The complete moral bankruptcy of the Trump administration was on display yesterday as the White House communications team dealt with the fallout from the leak of the heinous comments by Trump Special Assistant Kelly Sadler mocking Senator John McCain’s struggle with brain cancer.

People around the world were aghast when they heard about Sadler’s callous and offhand comment in a White House meeting that McCain’s opinion regarding CIA Director nominee Gina Haspel didn’t matter because “he’s dying anyway.”

With nary a peep of an apology for the highly insensitive comment issued by Trump or his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House was seemingly more concerned about the fact that the news of the remarks leaked to the press — adding to the already considerable mound of self-inflicted damage — than about the horrendously condemnable substance of the statement itself.

ABC Newsreported that Sanders brought the subject up in a closed-door White House communications staff meeting yesterday, but while calling Sadler’s comments “unacceptable,” she spent considerably more time focusing on the leak of the story than on the odious remark.

Citing “multiple senior White House officials,” ABC News describes a growing sense of mistrust and paranoia among Oval Office staff with many of them believing that the leak was targeted to damage Sadler personally, although it seems that she certainly provided a bountiful load of ammunition to whoever may have wanted to see her reputation smeared.

Axiosdescribes Sanders as “visibly upset and furious” during the meeting and correctly predicted that “this conversation is going to leak, too. And that’s just disgusting,” according to an attendee at the meeting.

Staffers participating in staff meetings now feel that they can’t trust their colleagues and are staying silent in the conclaves rather than risking saying something that may come back to haunt them according to people who were there.

Sadler reportedly called Meaghan McCain, the senator’s daughter and a host on NBC’s The View, to apologize for her comment, but did not apologize in the White House meeting.

Instead, White House strategic communications director Mercedes Schlapp spoke up in the meeting to express her support for Sadler:

“You can put this on the record… I stand with Kelly Sadler,” Schlapp commented, cementing her status as a deplorable.

The biggest offense that the leak caused from Sanders’ perspective is that the justified controversy over Sadler’s cruel attack on a dying Senator took the media attention away from what was supposed to be a day when the Oval Office would wallow in praise over the release of the North Korean hostages, an event that got lost in the avalanche of coverage of the McCain diss.

Unfortunately for Trump and his forked-tongued press secretary, the priorities of the media don’t align with the propaganda they want to spew. With a press disaster of their own making undermining their agenda, they only have themselves to blame for their failures. If they would simply stop being stupid and evil, perhaps things would run more smoothly for them.